Forks Are Too Straight
by Leo of Nohr
Summary: Due to a mishap (people being awful), Zelda ends up in a girl's room with a boy and Sheik, who is Sheik and not a girl, thank you. Administration thought this was a good idea, but it turns out that the three of them get on way too well.
1. Chapter 1

Link pulled a face as he looked up at the huge building ahead of him. Boring, boring, rich people, capitalism. The building looked fancy, his rich parents sent their problematic child to a new boarding school to get him to feel gratitude for how rich they were, the school got money for suppressing his creativity and used the money to make the building look more fancy and attract more rich people to it. It went round and round and he knew it and he hated it. He hated rich people and their stupid standards and their stupid leg shaving ideas and their stupid stupid cis boarding schools.

"What do you think, honey?" His mother had this stupid sickly sweet rich person voice on because they were out in vaguely public.

'It's ugly,' he signed, and he sighed loudly for as long as he could while she took a long time to mentally translate what he'd said. Honestly, if she just took some more sign language lessons she'd make up the time almost instantly. But she didn't really care about communicating with him, so he had to put up with the internet explorer-esque delays.

"No it isn't, sweetie, you just don't like it," she said. She was starting to look irritated, for goddess's sake, it had only been ten minutes since she'd taken a break from talking to him for the explicit purpose of being less irritated. "Give this a chance. I know you're intelligent, and this is a good school with good teachers. I don't want to hear any more of this boy thing, you hear me?"

He sighed again and didn't dignify her comments with a response. He knew he was smart and he was sure this school paid its teachers a lot of money to do their jobs properly and not molest the students, but the latter definitely still happened so he doubted that the first would be done.

He put his shoes on to get ready to get out of the car. He couldn't wait to be out of here and into a place where he wouldn't have to tolerate talking to his mother. She just didn't have the parenting skills to understand him well enough to take care of him properly. It wasn't anything new, it was just a new wave of disappointment every second he spent in her presence. Now he was thinking about it, boarding schools probably were better than the alternative.

As soon as the car stopped, he got out with a very quick wave to his mother and ran round to the back to get his case before anyone could offer to help him. He wanted to go in by himself because he didn't want his mother or the driver trying to speak over him. That's what people did whenever they were in his presence, it wasn't just them. They liked to talk instead of him because they could do it better than him, even though they couldn't speak for him. They damn well tried to though, and they failed more frequently than he got As. And he got those constantly.

It turned out that dragging a big and heavy pull along case across a gravel driveway full of expensive cars was really difficult, and Link didn't know why he was surprised. It was like this basically every year. He could try, though. It was hard and people kept staring at him (they were probably staring because of the bright pink case though, courtesy of his mother), but he eventually made it to the doors of his latest bourgeois prison. There, an overachiever in an expensive suit offered to show him to his room so he could take his case up there before going to get something to eat. Link was tempted to be terrible and ask him if there was room in his bed, but he'd tried that one two years ago and he hadn't really liked it. It wasn't really any fun.

"What's your surname then, mister…" Link wanted to jump for joy, but he didn't, because here came about two thirds of the battle.

'I can't speak,' he signed, not expecting the slightly spotty boy to understand the sign language, so he followed up the blank look he received with a motion to his mouth before shaking his head.

"Ah, yes, okay." The boy looked uncomfortable and spotty now, and Link delighted in that. "Well, I have a list, if you could find your name?" That was a rather fast recovery for someone who looked like he had no sense. Link almost admired him for it.

He scanned the list, unsurprised to find the wrong name. They better not have gone against his wishes, though. He'd asked and he'd gone through a long email discussion for this. He sighed, took a deep breath mentally and then pointed to his name.

The change, of course, was instant. "Oh, I'm so incredibly sorry Miss Faron! I apologise, I didn't mean to mistake who you were…" He hadn't been mistaken, but it wasn't like he could correct the boy or anything. Right first time, but now wrong for the foreseeable future. It was infuriating and Link was really starting to wish he'd caved and resorted to pen and paper despite his pride. He had a damn language and it wasn't his fault that no one could speak it. It was their fault.

Link then had to stand through a stream of apologies as the boy just wouldn't shut up as he showed Link up to his rooms. With a heavy (and furious) heart and an incredibly sick feeling in his stomach, Link noted where the rooms split off with girls on the right and boys on the left. And he was on the right. He'd spent hours trying to carefully compose emails to administration about this. He'd explained his rights and his safety and everything and they'd just ignored it, probably because of something his mother had said. A thought briefly crossed his mind of never speaking to her again, and it made him laugh a little, though not out loud.

"Here you go!" He said, a cheerful smile pasted on his face. "After you've put your bag down you can go down the stairs at the end of the corridor for your tour with your roommates." Joy of joys, maybe he'd tag along with someone else because he didn't fancy talking to some girls right now, especially not rich stranger girls.


	2. Chapter 2

The room they were all meeting up in was crowded and nasty. There were so many disgustingly rich and sweaty teenagers all standing in a vague circle, trying to work out who was the richest and who had the most influence over the rest of them. Hence, who would be the best target to make friends with. Link just stood there hoping that no one bothered to talk to him. Rich people were awful and he hated being one. His dearest mother always said that he should be grateful for what he had because he might never have to work a day in his life, and he owed that to the 'hard work' of his parents. Except his parents hadn't done anything, because they'd been brought up being told that they'd never have to work a day in their lives. And they didn't. They paid other people to do all the work for them and then they got most of the reward.

Link liked to think that his awkward existence was a form of karma that was punishing his parents for being shitty rich people, because they found him endlessly irritating. They hated him in the awkward parenting way where you weren't allowed to outright hate your child, just try to undermine them every step of the way instead because they were 'ungrateful' and 'didn't understand the effort that their parents put in'. They were right, he didn't understand. But the bit that he didn't understand was how they thought that they'd put any effort in at all, because they really hadn't.

"Okay, everyone!" Someone pimply and tall with a loud voice called. "I know you all want to get to know each other, but we need you to get into your room groups!" Instantly, everyone began shouting out their room numbers. Link didn't even remember what his was, not that he could shout it out to find his future room mates anyway.

"Um, hello?" A girl came and stood in front of him. She was taller than him, no surprise, and she had bright blonde hair he would bet was dyed because she was rich and bright blue eyes that were looking at him in a strange way. Instantly, he disliked her. On principal, of course, because she was rich and he hated rich people. "I saw you coming out of my room earlier, but I don't know. Were you sent to the wrong place?"

He shook his head and resigned himself to a long and awkward explanation, shifting his notepad into his hands so he could write to her. 'I can't speak,' he started, and to his surprise she nodded without a single look of pity. He no longer hated her, even though it was probably just that she was good at acting. 'I asked to be put in the boys rooms, but they obviously ignored me. I am a boy, though.'

The girl nodded again. "Okay," she said. "What's your name? I'm Zelda. I have a surname too, but I don't want to bother with that kind of thing."

He definitely wasn't going to hate her. Good, because there was no way that he was going to share a room with someone shitty. Not when the school had explicitly gone against his wishes, at least.

'My name is Link,' he wrote, hoping that she didn't laugh at his name like a lot of people had a habit of doing. He really hated it when people dismissed his name choice because it wasn't the usual kind of name people had. When he'd first told his mother, her first response was that it was a terrible name and she would never pick a name like that for 'her little girl'.

"Hang on," Zelda said, "do you know sign language?"

Link nodded, suddenly getting his hopes up. Useless, of course, because barely anyone knew sign language, they just 'thought that it would be cool to learn'. 'I'd communicate in it, but no one ever knows it.'

'I do,' Zelda signed, smiling at him, and okay he actually loved her now, in the not gay (she wasn't even his gender, she didn't qualify), friendly way. They were best friends now, she couldn't stop that. Oh, that made him so happy. Suddenly, he wasn't alone. There was someone he could talk to in the language he had been using all his life and it was great.

'How much?' He asked, just to check. Maybe she only knew the basics. Maybe she only knew the tiniest amount. He couldn't expect her to know as much as he did, because she could talk and she could hear.

'A fair amount,' she signed back. 'My nanny from when I was little had a deaf son and she taught me how to sign to him, but I kept learning it after she stopped looking after me.' It was done with such ease, such confidence, that Link didn't doubt that he would be able to communicate with her without a pen and paper. She was obviously the best room mate he could have ended up with, despite the fact that she was a girl. There probably weren't any boys who understood sign language, and Zelda seemed to be cool with him being a boy, which was a huge relief.

"Excuse me," someone said, and Link turned to see someone who looked rather angry at everything. Their skin was a darker colour that showed they were probably of Sheikah descent (that was when his darling mother would get the curse wards out, he was sure) and their eyes were the classic blood red. "I think I spoke to you earlier when I was coming out of our room." They scowled in the direction of Link, but he got the impression that the person did that to everyone they met, not just him. He was fairly sure that he did the same thing to most people anyway.

"Yes," Zelda said. "You're Sheik, aren't you? It seems the people in charge of rooms in this place may have mixed something up, because Link's also in our room."

Sheik sighed and audibly complained about Hylian cishets ruining everything. Link wanted to laugh very loudly, but he was worried it would attract too much attention if he did.

'Can I introduce you, or would you prefer to write?' Zelda signed to him.

'You can introduce me if you like,' Link said. He could always correct her if she said something wrong, after all.

"Well, Sheik, this is Link," Zelda said. "And from what I can tell, I think we're all going to be fantastic friends."


End file.
